Dynamic Control Card in a Production System Controlled by Conwip Approach

In this paper, the focus is on the dynamic control card in a conwip system. An approach to set the number of cards in order to adapt to the change of the production systems both in terms of external change as the demand and internal change as the work time of the machine, failures and so on. A Multi Agent Architecture is proposed to implement a flexible and extensible approach that can be implemented in a supply chain and not only in a single manufacturing system. Then, a set of rules is proposed to change the number of cards in the system. A dynamic simulation environment has been developed to test the control approach under different dynamic states. The performance measures evaluated are the average utilization of the manufacturing system, the throughput time, throughput, work in process and average available cards. The proposed approach is compared with a kanban control. © 2010 Jordan Journal of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. All rights reserved